


The Elephant and Oldcastle

by TempleCloud



Series: Journey to Camelot [2]
Category: Arthurian Mythology, Henry IV - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Anachronistic, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Racist Language, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25807771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Malvolio and Sir Andrew Aguecheek meet a disreputable old drunk who just might be destined to have greatness thrust upon him.  (More than is already round his waist, that is.)
Series: Journey to Camelot [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1871695
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

The night before Sir Andrew and I were due to sail, something distinctly peculiar happened – almost as peculiar as our having struck up a kind of friendship in the first place, for want of anyone else to talk to. I had offered to pay our bills at the _Elephant_ until Sir Andrew’s next month’s allowance arrived, if he promised not to eat or drink anything expensive. This was a matter of convenience, as I had a month’s wages from the Countess Olivia in lieu of notice, plus some savings, while Sir Andrew was heavily in debt.

Now, the money from Sir Andrew’s uncle had arrived at the Countess’s house, and the new Count, Sebastian, had brought it round to the _Elephant_ in person, so that he could apologise to Sir Andrew for having fought with him when they’d first met, and ask him if he was feeling better now, and hope we had a good voyage, etc, and Sir Andrew could reply that no, he didn’t bear any grudges, actually he thought his new scar made him look rather tough, and yes, he was fine, or at least didn’t feel any more confused than he generally did, well, he was an Englishman, if there was anything wrong with his brain it was down to all that British beef, ha ha, etc. And they shook hands and parted as friends, and, that evening after dinner, I went up to Sir Andrew’s room to help him pack his bags.

Sir Andrew went in ahead of me, and I heard him exclaim, ‘Toby, old chap, what are you doing here? I thought you were married to Maria!’ and then ‘Oh gosh, I’m frightfully sorry, I mistook you for a friend of mine.’

A deep, rich, wine-dark voice replied, ‘What makes you think I’d want to be friends with a wisp of straw like you? You’ve got a face the colour of cottage-cheese and an expression like a kicked spaniel, you know that?’

‘Yes, everyone says that,’ replied Sir Andrew meekly.

‘And you can’t even take an insult properly!’ exploded the voice. ‘If I’d insulted the Prince like that, he’d have insulted me straight back, and we’d have gone on being friends. You’re not much of a hallucination, I must say. I thought I’d got a better imagination than to invent something that looks like you!’

I knocked on the door. ‘Oh, come on in, hallucination,’ the voice said. ‘Only you’d better not be the Fairy Queen again.’

Now, I’m not in the habit of staying in inns, but the _Elephant_ is a fairly respectable establishment. Sir Andrew’s bedroom was rather larger and better furnished than mine, but all the rooms were clean and well-aired, and, even with the shutters closed, you could always hear and smell the sea. By contrast, the room we had stepped into now was gloomy, greasy and flea-ridden, and it stank. There was an old man lying in a bed in one corner, next to a table with a half-empty bottle of sherry and two large glasses. There were a dozen or so empty wine-bottles on the floor. 

The man did look rather like Sir Toby, only more so. He looked like a tapestry I had once seen of some satyrs, with an old satyr called Papa Silenus in the middle. He looked the way you imagine Father Christmas would after consuming one glass of sherry and once mince pie from every child in the world. 

(Not that Father Christmas ever came to our family when I was a boy. My parents explained that they didn’t want to bring me up to believe a lie, and that if people weren’t willing to keep Christmas properly with prayers and Bible readings, it was better not to celebrate it at all. Which I could see was reasonable, but it was still frustrating being the only child in the village who never got any Christmas presents, when children from much poorer cottages were showing off mittens that their mothers had knitted for them or wooden soldiers that their fathers had carved for them, or, at the very least, an apple and a piece of coal. Even if the apple was soon eaten and the coal had to go straight back in the fireplace, it meant they could jeer, ‘What’s wrong, Malvolio – Father Christmas hasn’t missed you out _again_ , has he? Haven’t you learnt to be a good boy yet?’ And I’d snap, ‘I didn’t _want_ Father Christmas to bring me any presents – only _babies_ want new toys for Christmas – but I asked him to bring _your_ mum and dad a fresh stick to whip you with – your dad’s belt must be nearly worn out by now!’ and stride off home before they could see whether I was crying. But I digress.)

I was surprised that the landlord had allowed someone like that to stay there, and even more surprised that we hadn’t heard him, as he was evidently the loud, talkative kind of drunk who would probably burst into song at the slightest excuse, usually in the small hours of the morning.

‘I don’t know how we’ve walked into the wrong room,’ I began, ‘but we’re certainly not hallucinations. We’re not the product of your drinking…’

‘Oh, it’s not the drinking,’ the old man said. ‘I’m dying, that’s all. My author’s decided to kill me off, and now he doesn’t know where to send me. You see, he knows there’s no logical reason why I should go to Heaven, when I’ve never done anything good and never been sorry for all the bad things I’ve done, but on the other hand he doesn’t want to send me to Hell, because he loves me, and he knows the audience does, too. So he’s sending me visions, and one minute it’s green fields and fluffy lambkins, and the next it’s hell-fire and damned souls looking like burnt raisins on the top of a cake, and then it’s you two: one who looks like a black crow and one who looks like a wrung-out dishcloth. Sorry, I’m not at my best and I can’t even come up with decent insults any more, so I’m just stating the facts. What d’you call yourselves, anyway?’

‘My name’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but that’s just because of the way I look, you know – I’m not actually diseased.’

‘My name’s Malvolio, but I’m trying not to deserve it these days,’ I said. In the past, I had always been rather proud of my name, because, after all, it was _my_ name, and it did have a certain Italianate elegance about it. But in the last couple of weeks, I had begun to wonder whether it was actually fair. It wasn’t as though I was noticeably more malevolent than, say, Sir Toby, who seemed to live as much for vindictive practical jokes on his friends and enemies alike as he did for drink and song.

‘Then why don’t you change it?’ demanded the old man, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘ _Change_ it?’

‘Well, you have to change your identity sometimes, don’t you? When you’ve got the world coming after you – police, girlfriends’ husbands, loan sharks, bookies, people with bills from wine merchants and pox-doctors, army officers wanting to know why you haven’t reported for duty – all barging into where you’re staying and saying, “Is there a John Oldcastle living here?” and your friends say, “Oldcastle? Never heard of him, sorry, you must have got the wrong address,” and they go away. Besides, they all know Oldcastle died heroically as a martyr, and I’m dying in bed alone, so it can’t be me, can it? Not that I’ve got any objection to dying in bed,’ he added, ‘but it’s a pity about the “alone” part. There used to be a tart here – nice girl, and even when I couldn’t make anything happen, if it wound up just being a cuddle, I promised to pay her just the same. And she knew I usually couldn’t afford to pay anyway, but they’d just put it on my bill, and I’d pay the lot if I got round to having any money.’

‘You mean the _Elephant_ is a brothel?’ I exclaimed, horrified. ‘This is supposed to be the best inn in Illyria!’

‘No, no, not the _Elephant_ in Illyria. And the place I’m talking about is shutting down that side of the business anyway, just because one of my minions has got married to the landlady and he’s too proud to run a brothel. They don’t even want to run it as an inn any more, just a pub and restaurant. Hah! He wasn’t too respectable to be a customer here in the old days, when the Prince was with us. But now that he’s become king, he thinks he’s got to be respectable and An Ideal King, and now everyone else seems to have the same idea.’

‘What does that mean: “An Ideal King”?’ asked Sir Andrew.

‘One who starts wars with other countries instead of having civil wars against people who used to be his allies when he was busy deposing the last king. The wars are exactly the same, but you have to travel further for them and the food tastes funny and the enemy are Frogs or rag-heads, so, as far as the history books are concerned, that means you were A Good Thing, even if you had to banish all your old friends before you could start being it.’

‘So this king banished you?’ I asked, feeling that the king had the right idea.

‘That’s right, sent for armed guards to march me and the other lads off to prison, and gave orders that we weren’t to be released unless we left his court forever – but I didn’t think he _meant_ it! I mean, we were mates, so we were always fooling around like that – we’d decide to do a highway robbery, but then the Prince would fail to show up, and then, when the rest of us were divvying up the cash, a mysterious cloaked figure would come out of the darkness and rob _us_ – and of course it turned out to be the Prince all along! He used to be fun, until suddenly he decided to be all grown-up and serious and responsible.’

‘There’s a difference between someone laughing _with_ you and laughing _at_ you,’ I pointed out.

‘Well, maybe there is,’ put in Sir Andrew, ‘but it’s still better than people _not_ laughing and not wanting to be your friend any more, isn’t it? We’re sort of banished too,’ he added kindly to the stranger, ‘well, we’ve banished ourselves, really. You see, my friend Toby – the one who looks like you…’

‘You mean old, fat, and drunk?’ suggested the stranger.

‘Uh, well, yes, actually, but anyway, his niece is the Countess of Illyria – this lovely girl called Olivia – and he invited me to come and stay so that she’d fall in love with me and we could get married, to try to cheer her up after her brother died. I mean, I wasn’t sure she was that interested in me, and there was this Duke called Orsino who was trying to court her as well and she wouldn’t even see _him_ – but Toby said she was just being distant to keep me interested, and I needed to try harder. And in the meantime, Maria – she’s Olivia’s housekeeper, only now she’s married to Toby – well, she decided it would be a good idea to write Malvolio a fake love-letter from Olivia, because he’d always wanted to marry her so he’d become the Count and could throw us out – so he got dressed up in what were his idea of trendy clothes and went in grinning like an idiot and…’

‘And this is turning into a very long story, and I’m sure this _gentleman_ would like a rest now,’ I said, trying to make the word ‘gentleman’ sound as though I meant it.

‘No, go on, what happened next?’ asked the old man. ‘Did she think you were mad, and throw you in the moat to try to bring you to your senses?’

‘The Countess Olivia is not in the habit of throwing her servants in the moat,’ I said stiffly (and there wasn’t a moat anyway). ‘No, she was called away by an urgent message, so she asked her uncle, Sir Toby, to take charge of me, and I thought that was my cue to assert myself by talking down to him. And he locked me up, and it was several days before I was freed, and then only by having to grovel to the Countess’s jester for help. And if you must know, I’ve had to leave a perfectly good job because it would be impossible for me to exercise any authority, and I still have nightmares about it sometimes, which shows how _hilarious_ it was!’

‘And anyway,’ continued Sir Andrew, ‘we none of us had a chance, because Olivia was in love with Orsino’s new page-boy who turned out to be a girl who was in love with Orsino, and Toby got me to fight a duel with her – the page-boy-girl, I mean, not Olivia – but it turned out to be her brother and he beat us up, and now Olivia’s married to him, and Toby doesn’t want to be my friend any more, and I don’t think he ever really liked me, he was just pretending to because he enjoyed laughing at me and spending my money. I thought he’d be like a sort of brother, because we’d fought the same enemy and been wounded together – you know, like the knights-errant in the legends?’

‘No, don’t be a knight-errant; be a knight erring, it’s much more fun. You wouldn’t want to die without having had a few adventures in your time, would you? Come on, have a drink and cheer up.’


	2. Chapter 2

‘Knight-errants have to be in love, like Sir Lancelot, don’t they?’ prattled Sir Andrew, refilling the two glasses. ‘Are you in love?’

‘No, not _in love_ , exactly,’ said the old man, ‘but I tried shagging married women, just like Sir Lancelot. It was after I’d been banished, and I was bored and fed up and broke – well, not all _that_ broke, the King was paying me a decent pension as long as I didn’t bother him, but not enough to drown my sorrows, so really he owed me more considering he was the one who caused my sorrows in the first place. Well, anyway, I told my followers to bugger off and stop depending on me, tried to find jobs for the ones who were too clumsy to be any good as thieves, and had a go at seducing women with rich husbands.’ He chuckled reminiscently. ‘It could have worked, too, only the two I chose turned out to be best friends, and they noticed that I’d sent them identical love-letters by the same post. Still, they _might_ have been up for a spot of group sex – it was worth a try! Trouble was, I’d probably found the last town in the world where the sexual revolution hadn’t happened yet, but they were just about modern enough not to know about _droit de seigneur_ , so I was on a loser either way, and those tight-arsed bitches decided to gang up on me and get revenge.’

‘What sort of revenge?’ I asked, wondering how this fat, ageing slob could ever have imagined that he was anyone’s idea of a romantic liaison.

‘Oh, inviting me round just before their husbands got back, so that I had to be smuggled out hidden in a basket of dirty laundry that got tipped into the canal, or disguised as somebody’s aunt, only the husband turned out to hate the aunt as well, so he beat me up. Still, it’s supposed to be third time lucky, so when they asked me to meet them in the local park at midnight, dressed as the ghost of an ancient gamekeeper with deer’s horns, I thought, well, I’ve partied long past midnight most nights, I’ve been a highway robber before dawn, I ought to stand a chance over respectable husbands who’d be asleep at that hour. Only I didn’t know they’d got their husbands in on the act, _and_ the entire town including the priest and the doctor, who were both immigrants who could barely speak English and wanted to see an English knight getting his come-uppance. All I knew was that suddenly both my girlfriends had run off, and a horde of fairies and goblins and satyrs had come to pinch me and burn me with their candles, and I kept telling myself I didn’t believe in fairies, but that wasn’t much help if fairies believed in me, and even if they weren’t really fairies, if they set fire to me they could still fry me in my own fat. It’s all the Puritans’ fault, you know; ever since they started the campaign to close the theatres, people have started making their own entertainment.’

‘Were they real fairies?’ asked Sir Andrew.

‘Of course not! They were just kids from the local school in fancy dress. And then my girlfriends and their husbands came back and told me what an idiot I was to think anyone would want to have an affair with me, and then they forgave me and invited me to dinner.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Went with them, and had venison pasties and cakes and spiced wine.’

‘You _accepted_ a dinner invitation from your enemies?’ I was horrified. Somehow, the man’s debauchery and criminality didn’t seem as grotesque as his complete absence of pride and his refusal to bear a grudge.

‘Of course I did. They’d finished being my enemies, and now they were willing to be friends. They’re not a bad lot, really: totally bourgeois and conventional, of course, but they can’t help that. And anyway, it had been hours since supper-time, and I was hungry.’ He took a drink, and seemed lost in thought for a moment. ‘I just wish I could have told the young King about it. I suppose when he heard about it, he just thought it was a good thing he’d got rid of me when he did, but if I could have told him about it, he’d have laughed until his knees gave way, and – oh God, I miss him!’

He began to sob uncontrollably, and Sir Andrew threw his arms round him and cried out, ‘I know!’ and they wept together. I forced myself to stand aloof and keep thinking, ‘What a pair of big babies: laughing one moment and howling the next!’ It would have been all too easy to give into the moment and cry with them, for the hopes we had lost and the people we had thought loved us, and the terrible loneliness of disillusion.

And then we heard the voice: ‘Arise, Sir John Oldcastle, Knight of the Round Table.’ I can’t explain where it came from, except that the voice was certainly in the room, not someone calling through the door. Sir Andrew and I edged away warily, but the old man, who had been slouching against the pillows, sat upright, looking suddenly fully alert. He pulled on a bathrobe (the cord of which didn’t quite meet round his waist) over his nightshirt, swallowed the last of his drink, and then swung his legs down from the bed and, grunting with effort, stood upright. I think the voice was still talking to him, although we couldn’t hear it any more. I am quite certain that he wasn’t mad or hallucinating, but that, somehow, he seemed to be stepping out of our world, or his, or wherever we were at present.

‘Of course, you do know that I’m a thief and a coward and a drunkard, and that I’ve already been banished by one king, don’t you?’ he asked, quite cheerfully. ‘You realise that by the time I’ve been there five minutes, probably I’ll have given Sir Galahad a black eye for being such a sanctimonious twat, and he’ll challenge me to a duel and I’ll panic and run away and you’ll need to rescue me? I’ll be nothing but trouble, and you’ll be ashamed of me.’

Presumably the voice said something reassuring, because he grinned. ‘You know what? You’re absolutely right! After all, when you chose the best knights in the world, they either feuded with each other or had sex with your wife or insisted on being so pure and virginal in order to find the Holy Grail that they must have been unbearable. So if you recruit the worst knights instead, it should work out better. That’s what I always did, when I was conscripting soldiers; if they couldn’t bribe me not to enlist them, they were obviously good army material. Well, foot soldiers: they’re just cannon-fodder anyway, aren’t they?’

He broke off, as if, for the first time, the voice was shocked by what he said, and was rebuking him angrily. At last he said slowly, ‘No. I suppose it wasn’t funny for the people who got killed. They were men who wanted to live just as much as I did, only I was leading from behind and they hadn’t got any armour, so I survived and they didn’t. I don’t know – maybe if I’d been taught by someone like Merlyn when I was a boy, I’d have grown into a decent man – well, it’s too late now, but – do you still want me with you, now you know what I’m like?’ He brightened. ‘Good, that’s okay then. Let’s go.’ And he walked towards the door, opened it, and disappeared.

Sir Andrew and I followed into the corridor, wondering whether we were going to find the man’s cronies guffawing, ‘You didn’t fall for that one, did you, Jack? God, you’re so gullible!’ But there was nobody there. When we went back through the doorway, we were back in Sir Andrew’s bedroom, with his clothes and suitcases, a small stack of phrasebooks and tourist guides, the notebook in which he wrote down any unusual words or phrases that he thought might make him sound intelligent, the viol he had been trying to learn to play for as long as I could remember, and an expensively-embroidered saddle which had belonged to an even more expensive horse which he had mislaid somewhere along the line. ‘Shall we start packing now?’ I suggested.

Sir Andrew yawned. ‘No, let’s leave it till the morning. Do you think he’ll be all right with King Arthur?’

‘He’ll be fine,’ I snorted. ‘He’s a knight, and outrageous enough to be funny, which means he can behave as badly as he likes and people will just chuckle indulgently and say what a character he is. I think when they say someone is “a character”, they mean they wish he was fictional. Anyway, I don’t suppose he really wanted to go with King Arthur, do you?’

‘Of course he did!’ insisted Sir Andrew. ‘That’s why he was arguing about it, because he had to make sure it was really true, because he didn’t want to be hurt that way again.’

‘ _Again_? You didn’t really believe his story about having been some prince’s favourite, did you? As if anyone would want to be friends with someone like that!’

‘Yes, I did believe him, actually,’ said Sir Andrew. ‘I think he needs to be loyal to someone who’ll be loyal to him. I know he probably isn’t a very nice person, but neither are we, and neither’s Toby or Maria or anyone else we know, except maybe Olivia, and we’re probably never going to see her again. There’s no law saying only good people can have friends, you know.’

And that was the miracle: not a fat old man appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing in the company of a mythical king, but that Sir Andrew Aguecheek had actually produced an idea of his own. Generally he knew two ways of dealing with people: either echoing their words and views in the hope that they would like him, or trying to be a fiery, quarrelsome young gallant who challenged people to duels for no particular reason (but usually forgot that challenges to mortal combat are not supposed to be signed, ‘Love from Andrew’). I had never heard him express a considered opinion on anything.

I had intended to wake Sir Andrew early the next morning to make a start on packing up his luggage (I had already dealt with my own), but in fact he was the one who came knocking at my door, looking rather dazed. ‘I say, Malvolio,’ he burst out, ‘did all that really happen, last night? I mean, finding my room had turned into someone else’s room, and then he went off with King Arthur?’

I looked him straight in the eye. ‘If you’re trying to tell me you had a strange dream last night,’ I said calmly, ‘then it was probably the result of indigestion. Do you think a cup of tea would help to clear your head?’

‘Oh. Uh, yes, please. Milk and three sugars.’

‘If you wish to destroy your teeth, that is entirely your decision, sir,’ I said, and went down to order two teas (one with milk and three sugars, one black with lemon) and to check the morning papers. Among the Illyrian newspapers were several foreign papers, including the London _Times_. I browsed through it while I was waiting for the tea to be ready, and noticed an item in the Obituaries section. The name wasn’t Oldcastle, but the man in the picture, looking cheerfully drunk at a party somewhere, was almost certainly the man who had been talking to us. 

He had died in London ‘after a brief illness’. The news stories filling most of the rest of the paper were about the King of England’s plans to invade France – which was puzzling, as I was fairly sure that England was ruled by a Queen, and that their main enemy was Spain.

I checked the dates on the paper. It was an old edition from 1415.


End file.
